Felix K - Tragedy Of The Commons // Limited to 500 Black Vinyl 12"

“Bleak” and “bombed-out” are two terms used to describe Felix K’s latest release,Â Tragedy Of The Commons. We have no full stream of the record at the moment, but thankfully we do have some rather hefty previews of the three tracks. The title track, “Tragedy Of The Commons,” has an eerie field recording of what sounds like a train passing overhead while you’re walking down the stairs from its station. The eerie analog sythesizer plays its four note sequence over and over, unchanging in rhythm, while the sounds continue to rumble in the background. The second track “Silent Money” takes you to a jungle, on a tropical island, where you’re perhaps doing some clandestine reconnaissance on the enemy. Of course, what’s a jungle without a maelstrom of rain coming down through the canopy. The last track is a remix of “Fundamentals” done by Onar Anxiety, which sounds like a deconstruction of jungle itself – quite dub-centric. Check out the preview toÂ Tragedy Of The CommonsÂ below via the Boomkat player and see what you think of it. Cheers!

Felix has been active in the underground of his native Berlin since the late '90s, often working incognito.

His roots are in drum-and-bass, and he has repeatedly advanced and invigorated the genre with his own adroitly minimalist, dub-centered productions, making important lateral connections to austere Hard Wax-school techno and more abstract electronic realms.

With their Hidden Hawaii label and its small galaxy of subsidiary labels, meanwhile, Felix and his co-conspirators are futurists who still kill the old way: doggedly DIY, committed to short-run white label culture and covert action.

Even in the context of his wide-ranging discography, Tragedy of the Commons' 17-minute title track is a stand-alone experiment in form: a labyrinthine, slow-burning dread epic, beatless but crushingly dynamic, its frail minimal synth lines wandering lonely amid plate-shifting bass drones and a dense, disorienting assemblage of field recordings.

The haunted weather intensifies in the hulking 'Silent Money'. While dub is there in the DNA of all his recorded output, this is perhaps Felix's most explicit nod to the source, a slow-motion soundsystem downer, armed with frequencies fit to disinter the dead.

Ghosts awoken stick around for Onar Anxiety's thunderous sub-low techno remix of 'Fundamentals', their howled chorus equal in force and fury to the cantering tribal drums.

The 12" was cut by Matt Colton and comes in full LP-style sleeve, with download code included.